Finland, Violence, and the Internet

September 23, 2008

I first heard about the horrific shootings at a Finnish vocational school on the radio this morning. A gunman killed 10 students at the school, before turning the gun on himself. Even before I got to the office, I had an uneasy feeling that the first headlines I read about the incident would run along the lines of "YouTube Killer Runs Amok." Sure enough, there have been no lack of such headlines today. Finnish media have identified the gunman as Matti Juhani Saari, a 22 year old student who attended the school where the shootings occurred. It does appear that Saari had a YouTube account, where he uploaded videos of himself firing a handgun at a firing range. Saari also had a MySpace page, and was involved in an Internet Relay Chat service called IRC-gallery. Not unlike many a 22 year old in Finland and elsewhere.

(Picture of the scene outside the vocational school in Finland. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

"Mr. Saari," the gunman's alleged YouTube account name, has all but disappeared from YouTube. His account has been suspended, and the videos posted there have been taken down for "violating terms of use." You can, without too much trouble, find them though if you dig around on the Internet for about 5 minutes. Finnish police, we're told, had seen some of these videos, and had questioned the shooter recently about them. His gun license (only the U.S. and Yemen have higher gun ownership rates than Finland) was not revoked.

This latest shooting is, as all incidents like this, unbearably sad, pathetic in the old school meaning of the word. But especially for Finns, who went through this before less than a year ago when an 18 year old killed eight people, then himself, at a school in southern Finland. That young man also posted violent videos on YouTube, and participated in IRC-gallery.

You see the pattern, right?

Today, some Finns were again questioning "the Internet's role" in these violent events. The Finnish Prime Minister today said in an interview: "My personal take is that, in one year, we have had two serious events like this, obviously the Internet plays a large part in this, these types of events have taken place abroad so people may be copying each other and taking role models from these types of gunmen."

So, what to do? Shut down YouTube in Finland? Cut the cord completely on the Internet? Employ an inordinate number of censors to troll through YouTube, MySpace, etc. looking for the relatively few bits of disturbing material?

Even the Finnish Prime Minister sees that down that way lies madness: "Young people get lots of influences from all forms of media, and it's impossible to legislate the influences young people may get...In a free democracy with free media, it's very difficult and practically impossible to legislate different kinds of violent entertainment, especially from just within one country."

Not that that stops places like Saudi Arabia, Iran and China from trying.

This is a tough, tough story for a technology journalist. The job is to try to answer a complex question -- in this case, what role, if any, does the Internet play in societal violence? Does the medium itself somehow bear responsibility, or is it the content pushed and pulled through that medium? I think these are interesting, compelling questions that cannot, and should not, be dispensed with the old "those crazy kids and their Internets" kind of answer. As journalists, we can, and should, provide the public with as many different viewpoints and as much context as possible.

But if we're writing headlines like "YouTube Killers," it's clear that the education starts first and foremost in our own newsrooms, and that we've got a long, long way to go.